


Familiarity

by aralias



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: M/M, The Year That Never Was, Valiant - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-20
Updated: 2011-04-20
Packaged: 2017-10-18 10:36:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aralias/pseuds/aralias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On board the Valiant, the Doctor struggles to deal with his guilt, unnatural old age and the Master's incorrigible sense of humour.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Familiarity

They have been six months aboard the Valiant and the Doctor’s hearts have broken.

He’s managed to keep himself sane until now - well, as sane as he ever was anyway - despite the speaker system the Master rigged up in his tent, lulling him to sleep every night with the sounds of real-time screaming. Every day, he’s thought his way carefully into the Arcangel network and felt himself strengthened by the thoughts of the people connected by it: so vibrant and full of life and still fighting back despite all the odds. It’s amazing, really _amazing_ , and it’s kept him going - knowing he can save these people. But now he’s figured out _why_ , like the clever boy he is … And it’s too much, surely, for anyone to bear - let alone the man who was just getting used to being the last of Time Lords.

Somewhere out there Martha is spreading the word, and that’s good, really it is. Martha Jones is steadily saving the world, and he’s so proud. It will be easy when the time comes to draw on that power. But today he can’t bear to tune in to the network connecting all those humans together. It seems like a betrayal. In many ways it is.

For the first time since he boarded the Valiant, the Doctor is alone, really alone. He closes his mind off, folds in on himself: his too old body shivering. The tent smells of despair and flattened straw. The Doctor inhales and wills the guilt to pass. He’s no good to anyone like this.

“Knock knock.”

The Doctor looks up. The Master is squatting, boyishly, in front of the tent door in black dress suit and crisp white shirt. He raps smartly on the air between the two of them. “Am I allowed in?”

“No.”

This is, of course, taken to mean yes and the Master crawls in, wrinkling his nose. “Ugh,” he says. “It smells dreadful in here. I don’t know how you can stand it. I did _ask_ for room service, but you know what these American establishments are like.” The Doctor closes his eyes and the Master prods him. “Oh, wake _up.”_ He sweeps aside some of the straw so he can sit on marginally cleaner tiles and whilst the Master’s attention is focused elsewhere, the Doctor moves his left leg an inch to the right so when the other Time Lord sits down they will not be touching. He’s thought about it and decided that it’s better if they don’t touch.

“Where were you?” the Master demands, once comfortably seated. There is no cruelty in his voice. He’s won, or thinks he has, which, at the moment, is the same thing, and so he’s willing to be pleasant. “We’ve talked about this: I ring the bell; you crawl out on your knees. We discuss the day’s adventures over Mrs Jones’s luke-warm tea. You sit there, looking pathetic if you like, and I tell you exactly which islands I destroyed the day before so you can be properly informed for the day’s guilt-fest. Come on: it’s fun, isn’t it?”

“Please,” the Doctor says. “Not today.”

The Master grins. “Touched a nerve, have I? Good to know. I’ll file it away.” He mimes a writing implement and notes on his hand: _“Doesn’t like to be reminded of the time he doomed humanity.”_ He folds the imaginary note and places it in his jacket pocket. “Got it.” He pats the pocket and grins again. “That one’s a keeper.”

The Doctor is quiet and after a pause the Master continues. “You know, I’m thinking of moving Francine onto cleaning duties. What do you think?” Another pause. “The woman can’t make tea. _What_ is up with that? Everyone can make _tea_. I can make _tea_. But not her. Not Mrs Jones, apparently. Why’ve I got the only maid in the country, no, in the world, who can’t make tea? I feel a need for good tea. The Master of the Universe should be able to have good tea if he wants, don’t you think so, Doctor? … Doctor?”

The Doctor is silent. The Master pouts like a small child. “Come on, talk to me. You’re not being any fun today.” His voice is still affable as he says: “You know, I’m thinking of _killing_ Francine. Do you feel like talking _now_?”

“Don’t,” the Doctor says, trying to get up. But the Master, having adopted a look of condescending sympathy, pushes him back down gently.

“Oh, one _word’_ s not going to be enough to save her, Doctor. And why should it? She betrayed you, you know.” He starts to laugh. “She actually trusted _me_ , over you. That’s just a bit stupid, isn’t it? There’s no helping people like that. You know… I think she deserves to die.” He raises his voice. “Francine, my darling? Over here”. He winks and ducks out of the tent. “I’ll be back in a minute… _Francine_?”

The Doctor pushes himself upright again, on shaking-one-hundred-and-thirty year old arms, and crawls painfully out of the tent. He hasn’t had an old body for so long that he’d almost forgotten what it feels like to be this helpless in his own skin. It was somehow easier when his mind felt old, but though he still has the same knowledge - more actually - he still feels very young. The converse trainers on his feet are meant for bouncing around enthusiastically and the Doctor likes bouncing, at least, he does this time around. Or, at least, he did, before the Master tried to end the world. Now, everything seems to have slowed down. Francine has just curtseyed, no deeper than is absolutely necessary.

He reaches the Master and grabs hold of his trouser leg. The Master looks down at him, and raises an eyebrow. He is already holding the laser screwdriver.

“Master, please,” the Doctor says, his old voice still unfamiliar in his own ears. “Please, don’t do this. I’m begging you.”

There is a short pause and, for a moment, the Doctor thinks he may have judged the situation all wrong, and the Master is really going to kill Francine this time, just to teach him a lesson. Then the Master sighs and pockets the screwdriver again. “ _Tea_ , Francine,” he says.

“Yes, _Master_ ,” Francine says: her eyes hard, her jaw set with hate “Will there be anything else?”

“No. Just tea. Off you go.” Francine curtseys again, and strides off. “And make sure it _tastes of something_ this time, all right? There’s a good girl”.

He leans against the conference table and turns back to the Doctor, who is sitting on the floor, elderly hearts thumping so loudly that his head fills with something like the sound of drums. “So,” the Master says. “Last night we said goodbye to Crete. But today, I’ve decided to turn my attention to the people of Luxemburg. After all, they are my subjects too. And I thought… I thought I’d do something nice.”

“ _You_ are doing something nice?” the Doctor asks. “You’re aware a statue of yourself to raise morale doesn’t count as nice and doesn’t raise much morale.”

The Master ignores him because now he’s demonstrated the penalty for silence it is quite safe to do so. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Gallifrey,” he says, and his eyes flicker slightly, because he really is remembering. “I remember falling asleep the sound of the sea. The drums weren’t so loud then and it was so… _peaceful_.”

“Luxemburg doesn’t have a sea coast,” the Doctor says kindly. “But we could go somewhere that does. Just you and me. In the TARDIS. We could do that. On another world even. There’s this great little planet, Kjiln, only about 700 light years from here. Martha and I went to last year, with purple seas and tiny sea monkeys. Wouldn’t that be nice? Purple seas…” he trails off.

The Master smiles and it is only half mocking, as if he is genuinely touched, whilst being genuinely annoyed at the same time. “Oh, Doctor, you’re being selfish, that’s not like you. I’m not talking about us, we’ve had our chance. But the people of Luxemburg, they’ve never been able to fall asleep to the sea. I bet they’d like a sea coast. Of course, they would. But as you point out, there’s that big mass of land there. What’s it called again?”

“You’re going to wipe out Belgium,” the Doctor begins, “just so Luxemburg can enjoy a bracing sea breeze?”

“ _Belgium_. That’s it.” The Master slaps his head in a parody of stupidity. “Yes, I am.” He stands up. “I’m feeling insanely generous today. You even go back to sleep if you like. Somebody stop me - I’m on a roll!”

Of course, the Doctor does not go back to sleep. He spends the day carefully talking the Master out of destroying Belgium. In the end, the other Time Lord gives him a bored look, says he won’t bother being nice next time and wanders away, leaving the country intact, if not unscathed. The ‘Toclafane’ are still sweeping across the continents; nowhere is unscathed any more. But, at least, Belgium has a chance to recover. He’s not entirely sure where Martha is at this moment, but it’s possible she’s down there, and the Doctor allows himself to feel pure gratitude, untainted by misery and guilt. Martha is still alive. Luxemburg doesn’t have a sea coast.

The day passes in relative peace and the Doctor retires to his tent. The speaker system seems to have broken down. Tonight there will be no screaming. It is an enormous relief not to hear it, even though he knows that they are still dying out there. Six months, half a year, and they’ll all be all right again.

He breaks deftly into the Arcangel network — it’s easy by now — and becomes one with the majesty and the baseness and the courage and the miserliness of the human race. Carefully, he reaches out to Martha, just to say hello and well done and, by the way, he’d saved Belgium today, wasn’t that good? But the drums are suddenly louder and the Doctor is pulled back by the awareness of his physical form, and of the Master’s arm which is draped across his body and of the Master’s manicured fingers taptaptaptapping unconsciously on his chest.

Without meaning to, the Doctor makes a small noise that sounds a bit like “guh” and tries to move out of the embrace - it is better if they don’t touch — but it is a very small tent and there isn’t anywhere to go.

This is not the first time the Master has visited him during the night. Usually he has had a brilliant idea which he needs to tell to someone who will understand it, or he’s forgotten the words to _Eleanor Rigby_ or whatever and won’t leave until the Doctor has sung the entire song through to him four times so he can be sure he has it all. It is the Master’s firm belief that everyone exists to serve him. He believes this even when he’s not in control of an entire planet, and now that is, he seems to delight in inconveniencing them whilst they do. In many ways, the Doctor reflects, it would be far less alarming if he were to appear at four in the morning with a pile of sticks, a magnifying glass and an egg and demand to be made breakfast, with appropriate musical accompaniment on the kazoo.

Instead, the Master is actually asleep, or seems to be. He takes in deep, silent breaths. His eyelids flicker slightly and the Doctor knows that he is dreaming of Gallifrey: the home that neither of them returned to often enough, and that they can never go back to, even though the Doctor owns a time machine. Gallifrey is gone, more gone than anything else will ever be. All that remains of it are a handful of relics, the TARDIS and the two Time Lords lying inside a military issue tent on board the Valiant.

The TARDIS feels a bit like home, but not like this. This close to the Master, every part of the Doctor is screaming with remembered familiarity, with how good it feels simply to be close to someone who is like him. Fortunately, there is no skin-to-skin contact and so the effect is muted, but even so — the Doctor feels like he has stood up too quickly from a chair and then sat down again to find the chair gone. The Master’s fingers are still tapping and the Doctor almost reaches up with his wrinkled hand to stop it, before withdrawing quickly.

This is why he hasn’t touched the Master since he got here, at least not voluntarily. The man is a sociopath and a killer. But it’s worse than that because this time he’s remade himself in the Doctor’s image.

It’s taken the Doctor six months to work out what it was that both attracted and repelled him about this new Master, this Mr Saxon, but when he figured out what the Toclafane really were it all became horribly clear. The Doctor has, himself, never been very good at regenerating, and this has resulted in some fairly disastrous personalities with fairly disastrous tastes in suits. But the Master — well, apart from world domination, regeneration is what he does best.

Standing outside the TARDIS at the end of the universe, the Doctor had heard the voice of Professor Yana, now impossibly more dreadful. “If the Doctor can be young and strong…” but he hadn’t thought then, what that meant. The new Master is young, yes, and surprisingly strong as his vice-like grip around the Doctor’s chest is proving with each passing minute. But he’s also handsome and quirky. He smiles with all his face like the Doctor does. He’s funny and charming and he bounces when he’s excited. He doesn’t wear converse, but he does wear very sharp suits like the Doctor does, and, of course, like the Doctor, he’s completely obsessed with the human race.

Of course, they are different enough that — but for the Master’s madness and disregard for others — they could be friends. They have been friends before, and, judging by the terrible longing still coursing through the Doctor’s body to press skin to skin and feel the Master’s thoughts flooding him, now they could be… not alone together. And the Doctor finds himself wanting this more than anything else he has ever wanted. More than he wants Rose Tyler to cross back from the other world. If the Master would only leave the Earth alone, he would burn up twelve, twenty, fifty suns to be with him somewhere, on a new Gallifrey, anywhere.

But instead, the Master, feeling perhaps even more alone having not even seen the end, has become a new sort of Doctor and has seized control of a people he loves, just to get his attention. It is this realisation that broke his hearts in the end. Everything that the Master has done has been for the Doctor. It feels like when Jack sheepishly owned up to re-starting Torchwood, magnified by a figure too large for even a Time Lord to contemplate. A tribute and a betrayal all mixed up together in a big confusing mess.

The Master stretches slightly in his sleep and his forehead brushes the Doctor’s chin briefly, before settling on his shoulder again. The Doctor sees Gallifrey for a moment through the Master’s eyes, and feels with him the incredible sense of sadness and alone-ness they share.

Then he realises how this will end and that his hearts are no longer broken. They beat in time with the Masters’, like the quadruple beating of drums. The Master can never truly win, because he doesn’t want to now, not like this.

And so, the Doctor forgives him.


End file.
